Bottom to Top

Last year, when I first started to make clothes, I tried McCall's 5313, a jumper pattern. I'd seen a pattern review on...well...Pattern Review, where the girl looked so very cute in the jumper she'd made. Alas, I misjudged the size, and it came out way too big in the chest. I've blocked out the most awful of the memories, but I did mess around with it for way too long and eventually achieved a better fit. However, I misjudged more than the size. The girl in the picture looked oh-so-cute, but I'm not a girl. Whenever I put it on, I felt like a giant, overgrown baby. Besides that, those two flowers on the bodice looked a little too much like boobies. I finally decided to chop it up and make something I'd actually wear.

It would have been easy enough to make it into a skirt, but, believe it or not, I wasn't feeling it. So I dragged out all my patterns and sorted through them to find one I could cut from the skirt of the dress. The winner turned out to be Simplicity 7223, view E, a sleeveless blouse. To make it fit on the fabric I had available, I cut the back on a seam instead of a fold. I also had to use a different fabric for part of the facing. I wish I'd had some sort of neat, tiny print that coordinated, but I didn't. I finally just used some khaki I had here for the part you don't see when it's on a hanger.

When I started, I was convinced this would be easy as pie, because I wouldn't have sleeves to set in. Little did I know I'd be fiddling around with bias tape to finish off the armholes. Ugh, that's really a tedious job, pinning it in place!

The irony in all this is that I decided to refashion the jumper because it was something I never wore, and I turned it into a sleeveless top, which is something else I never wear. That field was filled with birds when I went outside, and I scared them all away with my ghost white arms!